The Secret of the Black Paintings

By Arthur Lubow

Published: July 27, 2003

Venerated as the first modern artist, Francisco Goya produced nothing more abrasively modern than the series of 14 images known as the Black Paintings, which a half-century after his death were cut from the walls of his country house on the outskirts of Madrid. Even today, when you come upon them in the sanitized confines of the Prado Museum, these nightmarish visions can unmoor you. An ancient crone grins ghoulishly over a bowl of food; a demonic figure whispers in the ear of a stooped old man; a midnight coven surrounds a goat-headed sorcerer; a dog raises its head forlornly; and, most famous of all, a raggedy-bearded man with bulging eyes devours a human form that is already reduced to red meat. Of this last iconic image -- called ''Saturn,'' after the Titan who ate his children -- the art historian Fred Licht has written that it is as ''essential to our understanding of the human condition in modern times'' as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling is to our grasp of the 16th century.

So it made perfect sense that Scala Publishers, which specializes in art books and museum catalogs, would commission a book on Goya's Black Paintings. To write it, the editor, Antony White, signed up Juan José Junquera, a professor of art history at Complutense University in Madrid who is best known for his studies of 18th-century Spanish furnishings. A burly, gray-haired man, Junquera, 60, has made a career of tunneling through the labyrinthine Spanish archives. During the eight years that he researched his doctoral thesis, on the art of the court of Goya's royal patron, Charles IV, he spent five hours every weekday morning in the archives. ''It is amusing,'' he says. ''You can touch everyday life. Their way of eating, their way of dressing, their way of thinking -- their whole life is before your eyes.'' Having taken on the subject of Goya's Black Paintings, Junquera proceeded to scrutinize the documentary record. Before long, he realized that he had a problem.

The Black Paintings decorated the walls of the Quinta del Sordo, or ''House of the Deaf Man,'' which Goya purchased in February 1819. (Although Goya was deafened by a near-fatal malady that struck in 1792, the house already bore this name when he bought it.) On Sept. 17, 1823, not long before the collapse of a short-lived liberal regime and the return of the reactionary King Ferdinand VII, Goya signed over the farmhouse, which was built in the late 18th century, to his only grandchild, Mariano. The next year, perhaps for political reasons (the word ''perhaps'' is attached to almost every detail of Goya's biography), the elderly artist left for France, where he resided until his death in 1828 in Bordeaux. The Black Paintings were neither commissioned nor sold, and during Goya's lifetime, no visitor reported seeing them. As a result, it is impossible to date them precisely. They are usually thought to have been created between 1820 and 1823. For a historian with Junquera's propensities, such vagueness is highly unsatisfactory. Indeed, it is an incitement to plunge back into the archives.

Goya's purchase contract for the Quinta was not discovered until 1946, but since then it has been closely examined. So has the deed of transfer that Goya made to Mariano in 1823. When Junquera analyzed these documents and a description of the property at the time of Mariano's marriage in 1830, he reached a startling conclusion. In his reading, the bill of sale to Goya describes a residence of two low dwellings, only one-story high; the later account of Goya's renovations, which was made for Mariano's marriage settlement two years after the painter's death, does not mention the addition of another story. The Black Paintings were found on the Quinta's upper and ground floors. If the second story of the house was added after Goya's death, the researcher was forced to deduce that Goya did not paint the Black Paintings.

''I started to read what has been written about the Black Paintings,'' Junquera recalls in his small living room, crammed with books, bibelots and antique furniture, in the affluent Salamanca district of Madrid. ''I found that it was something impossible.'' There are just two published sightings of the paintings by contemporaries of Goya. The first is the so-called Brugada inventory, compiled by Goya's friend Antonio de Brugada, a liberal Spanish painter who for political reasons fled Spain for Bordeaux in 1823. In the inventory, which was putatively written in the 1820's but not published until 1928, Brugada listed and recognizably described 15 paintings -- one more than are now known -- in the downstairs dining room and the salon above it. The second contemporary record of the Black Paintings is a magazine article published in 1838 by Valentín Carderera, an artist and collector, who recounted that in Goya's country retreat ''there is hardly a wall that is not full of caricatures and works of fantasy, including the walls of the staircase.''

The Brugada inventory and the Carderera account -- that's it. Except for two cursory appraisals by art specialists retained in the 1850's when the house was placed on the market, there is not one further word in the literature about the Black Paintings until the French art scholar Charles Yriarte described them, with accompanying engraved reproductions, in a book about Goya that he published in Paris in 1867. The public did not get to see them until the Baron d'Erlanger purchased the house and retained a painter and restorer, Salvador Martínez Cubells, to remove them from the walls. The Black Paintings were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878 and then donated to the Prado.